Hollywood's 25 Most Powerful Authors
Meyer learned a very valuable lesson after reading an early script for Twilight that featured guns, nightvision goggles and speedboat chases: Set ground rules before signing away your rights. Meyer is grateful the Paramount/MTV Films project ultimately didn’t get made. When the rights reverted to her, she thought, “OK, I’m taking this home, and no one’s ever touching it again.” But a call from Summit’s Erik Feig (since named Lionsgate’s president of production)
changed everything in 2007. “He said, ‘Please, we’ll do anything,’ and he let me come up with a rider where I wrote all these things they couldn’t change,” she recalls. Among the requirements: No film deaths that didn’t match the books. With The Host, set in a dystopian future where human bodies have been invaded by aliens, Meyer faces the unique challenge of penning the novel’s sequel while serving as a producer on the $44 million adaptation of the original story, directed by Andrew Niccol (Gattaca). Open Road Films might be hoping to achieve the same success as Summit’s $2.8 billion-grossing Twilight franchise, but Meyer’s prediction might disappoint. “I don’t expect anything to be like Twilight again,” she says. “That was such a weird experience, and to have everything be so crazy and bizarre, the fanaticism — that’s just not normal.”
